FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla.—Six months before his murderous attack, Nikolas Cruz trespassed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, wearing a hoodie, carrying a backpack and — ominously now — mingling among students, newly released records reveal.
He’d been forced out of Stoneman Douglas the previous school year. But computer science teacher Sandra Rennie told a detective she saw Cruz among other students on the first day of school in August 2017.
“I was like ‘oh Nik, you’re back,’ and he’s like: ‘Yeah I’m back,’ and I was like ‘OK well good to have you back.’”
In a recent interview with The South Florida Sun Sentinel, Rennie said she wasn’t alarmed but immediately went to an administrator and asked whether Cruz was on her classroom roster.
She was told no — and an administrator hustled off to find Cruz and presumably escort him off the property.
Cruz returned to the campus on Valentine’s Day of this year, toting an AR-15. From afar, a security watchman saw him carrying what he thought was a duffel bag but did not intercept him and Cruz murdered 14 students and three educators.
Rennie’s comments were part of a batch of new witness statements released by prosecutors Friday in one of the nation’s worst mass shootings.
They show:
—Assistant Principal Winfred Porter initially called for an evacuation after hearing the fire alarm and seeing a control panel in the administration building that indicated the problem was a gas leak. Soon after, campus monitor Elliot Bonner — who had served in the Marines — called a Code Red, locking down the school after hearing gunshots.
—Security Specialist Kelvin Greenleaf described how he viewed security video showing Cruz inside the 1200 Building and radioed the information to armed sheriff’s Deputy Scot Peterson, who was taking cover outside. It’s unclear, however, whether Greenleaf was watching Cruz in real time or on taped footage. Peterson was forced to resign for failing to run into the building and confront Cruz. He claimed he did not know where the shots were was coming from.
He said he passed a Coral Springs officer running toward the shooting.
—Cruz sent vile Instagram messages in August 2017 to a male rival for a girl’s affections. Cruz had started a brawl with the student in September 2016. Among his profanity-laced diatribe: “I will kill you!!!!! Iam going to shoot you dead,” a transcript shows.
That student was not one of those shot and killed.
Rennie was very familiar with Cruz, having taught him in an engineering class. She said he “didn’t make a lot of eye contact, kept his head down a lot,” and was quiet.
He once admitted destroying a class project — bridges made out of toothpicks and Popsicle sticks — so others wouldn’t get a better grade, she said.
Asked about his grades, she said: “He has F’s.”
“Every, every semester he did, he did nothing, and if he did do something he didn’t do enough to follow through and finish any assignment.” She said he was absent a lot or uninterested.
In her class he got upset because a firewall on a class computer prevented him from researching “different types of guns,” used for hunting.
He also showed her images of disfigured people that he thought were funny.
After Cruz’s fight in September 2016, she said, an assistant principal sent out an email telling teachers that Cruz was not allowed to carry a backpack. Rennie said she recalled the school was trying to get paperwork together to return him to Cross Creek, a school for children with emotional behavioral disorders.
Instead, Cruz, then 18, refused to go and ultimately was forced out of Stoneman Douglas in February 2017.
Rennie said he didn’t have enough credits to graduate and was directed, instead, to a program that could help him get a high-school equivalency diploma. “He did not want to leave Stoneman. Did not want to go. He was so, he was so mad. He did not want to go,” she said.
From Rennie’s account, administrators and security staff at Stoneman Douglas were well aware of Cruz. She surmised that they viewed him as “sneaky.”
“They would always call him over: ‘Hey Nik, how you doing today,’ you know, and just, like, keep contact with him all the time and always calling him up to the office for something and he’d go: ‘What did I do now?’”
Looking back, Rennie said she wasn’t surprised when she learned the shooter on Valentine’s Day was Cruz.
“I just felt like he was one of these kids that would just do something just to see what it was like to do it.”
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